Notices by Kevin Marks (kevinmarks@xoxo.zone)

@Nickiquote @halfempty You know, I think what he is really building is the copy of the Total Perspective Vortex in Zarniwoop's pocket universe that is only there to serve his ego.

@halfempty @Nickiquote exactly. If you were doing a Heinlein reference you'd call it Mycroft (from Moon is a Harsh Mistress) or Minerva (from Time Enough For Love). But Musk is basically Vroomfondel, making money on the chatshow circuit predicting what AI will do.

@ByrdNick indeed, I've been saying this for a while now (I'm not a neurologist though) https://www.kevinmarks.com/confabulation.html

@dymaxion @Tarah @quinn sounds about right, I have a cite from 2012

@lmorchard @evan the bsky one that works is a browser extension, so that is a viable technique until people end their twitter accounts. You could also the following.js in the Twitter export, but that's uids, so you'd need a name cache somewhere.

@mmasnick @quinn @riana @danmcd @alecm @normative I read this as "nerd herder" in the first post and thought it was a very different concept, and it also made me think of Carrie Fisher

@thisismissem @pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan @samsethi did this change in a recent Mastodon version? Have client apps caught up with it?

Maybe Google shouldn't strip non-ascii characters when training AI

Suggestion for @phanpy
Threads web has a nice affordance where people you don't follow have a little plus sign in that you can click to follow them. It turns into a tick when you do. (The tick is only in the immediate post-follow context, normally people you follow are unbadged)

@evan it was a lot easier to pitch PubSubHubbub than WebSub

“I’m seeing a revival now,” said Levels, regarding PHP. “People are getting sick of frameworks. All the JavaScript frameworks are so… what do you call it, like [un]wieldy. It takes so much work to just maintain this code, and then it updates to a new version, you need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.” https://thenewstack.io/developers-rail-against-javascript-merchants-of-complexity/

The reason calling MAGA weirdos weird works is Wilhoit's law:
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
If you tell them they're the out-group their entire worldview collapses and they imagine what it would be like if they were on receiving end of habitual cruelty.

@cstross even that analysis assumes that the LLM frenzy is actually valuable, and more valuable than existing cloud services. When they realise that there is not enough actual utility people will pay for, how does this shake out then?

Reporting of the latest UBI test programme is ignoring the key finding, obvious to anyone who knows low income people, that their first impulse was to spread the wealth to others.
This thinking is so alien to economists and financial types that they barely discuss it. https://www.openresearchlab.org/findings/key-findings-spending

@julian @johnonolan @mike the origins of ActivityPub is Atom, which had the name/summary/content split, and we preserved that through the various Activity Streams iterations, from Atom to JSON to the current JSON plus LD.
Mastodon undermines this by ignoring post names and treating summary as a Content Warning.

“We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary intellectual baggage. The IP metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way.” https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

@uint8_t have a look at phanpy.social in catch-up mode where it collates all posts for a chunk of time and let's you browse the by author, tag etc

@tchambers @pfrazee.com this one shows bridged users https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:i65enriuag7n5fgkopbqtkyk

“Type 3 Error – from an old blog post about statistics. A “type 1” error is, in the textbooks, a false positive, while a “type 2” is a false negative. But the Type 3 error is, in my experience just as much of a problem – it refers to “a correct number which isn’t the one your boss wanted”.” https://backofmind.substack.com/p/lexicon

@evan @ben @Gargron @davew What we found with people serious about licencing is that an explicit link is the rendered HTML is actively useful - see Flickr for example.